Caelum Gallery is proud to exhibit James Nazz’s first solo show, Fragile, a series of sculptures using eggs, shell and all, as the main ingredient for his storytelling.

For over 30 years, Nazz has been building his sculptures as a way of re-imagining events, emotions, people, and items familiar to our everyday lives. The egg on its own is an object of loaded symbolism. This enabled Nazz to combine the egg with different materials to realize and elevate his individualized stories. Nazz has gone through hundreds of real eggs (sourced from his local restaurant and supermarket) and carefully filled them with plaster, so that they can stand in their natural form while imbedded in a surrealistic fashion.

Nazz’s creative relationship with eggs began back when he was a painter making egg tempera for his paintings. One day, after stacking eggshells on top of one another as an attempt at organization, he unknowingly began his first sculpture known as “Genesis”, which took on a phallic form. The symbolic irony of this sculpture--“a female object creating something male”--catapulted Nazz to where his art stands today.

“Eggs represent a life form, neither gender or species specific. This versatility, fragility of the shell, and beauty of its texture and color allows me to combine the eggs with other objects and situations with conflicting realities and of human feelings. The egg is nourishment, an object that almost everyone on earth is familiar with, and knows what it is from an early age.

What do you expect to happen when you drop an egg?”